Disclosures are essential to maintaining the independence of accredited continuing education. Whether or not your planners or faculty believe their financial relationships are relevant to your educational activity, it’s essential that they disclose to you ALL relationships they have had with ineligible companies over the past 24 months. Standard 3 states that:
“Individuals must disclose regardless of their view of the relevance of the relationship to the education.”
Planners, faculty, and all others in control of content may not have the full context or ability to accurately assess the relevance of their financial relationships with ineligible companies. They need to disclose to you all financial relationships with ineligible companies and not just those that they believe are relevant to the content of the CE activity. Then, you, as the accredited provider, decide if the relationships are relevant or not.
Accreditation Tips
- Check that you’re meeting expectations and collecting the right information by using the sample disclosure form provided by ACCME: Template for Collecting Information about All Financial Relationships from Planners, Faculty, and Others. You can also find it on page 4 of ACCME’s Standards Toolkit.
- If you use your own form or process to collect disclosures, compare it to this template to make sure you are meeting ACCME’s expectations. An unfortunately common cause of noncompliance is that providers have not acquired all the necessary information they need to help them identify financial relationships.
Video for Your Planners and Faculty
We recognize that sometimes planners and faculty do not understand why you are asking them to disclose their financial relationships or what you’re asking them to disclose. To help you explain, we’ve created this brief video for clinician educators. It describes the important role those in control of content play in protecting the integrity of accredited continuing education. As you plan educational activities, we encourage you to share it with your planners, faculty speakers, authors, and reviewers.
